After the beat generation graduated from young adulthood to middle age in the 1960s, beat writers went in different directions. Following an extended stint at the wheel of the bus of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, Cassady collapsed along a railroad track and died of exposure in Mexico in 1968. Kerouac's seemingly endless cycles of exile and return to his mother's home in Lowell ended in 1969 when he died an alcoholic's death of cirrhosis of the liver. Burroughs, perhaps the least likely of beats to make it past middle age, is alive and well and enjoying the acclaim of European critics. Ginsberg too has survived even his transmigration from literary rebel to de facto poet laureate of the United States. In this way beat writers have earned a place in the history of American letters.

What I have argued here is that the beats also deserve a place in...